OCTOBER 2004

Books bought:

Chekhov: A Life in Letters
Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters
The Letters of Kingsley Amis
Soldiers of Salamis—Javier Cercas
Timoleon Vieta Come Home—Dan Rhodes
The Wisdom of Crowds—James Surowiecki
Liars and Saints—Maile Meloy
Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall—Anna Funder
Seven Types of Ambiguity—Elliot Perlman

Books read:

How I Live Now—Meg Rosoff
Liars and Saints—Maile Meloy
Through a Glass Darkly: Life of Patrick Hamilton—Nigel Jones
Father and Son—Edmund Gosse
The Siege of Pleasure—Patrick Hamilton
So Many Books—Gabriel Zaid

Sex with cousins: are you for or against? I only ask because the first two books I read this month, Maile Meloy's Liars and Saints and Meg Rosoff's How I Live Now, answer the question with a resounding affirmative. (It's a long story, but in Liars and Saints, the couple in question is under the impression that they're actually uncle and niece, rather than cousins—and even that doesn't stop 'em! Crikey!) People are always plighting their troth to and/or screwing their cousins in Hardy and Austen, but I'd always presumed that this was because of no watercoolers, or speed-dating, or college dances; what is so dispiriting about Liars and Saints and How I Live Now is that they are set in the present, or even in the near future, in the case of the latter book. No offense to my cousins—or, indeed, to Believer readers who prefer to keep things in the family—but is that really all we have to look forward to?

I know that when it comes to subconscious sexual deviation there's no such thing as coincidence, but I swear I haven't been scouring the bookshops for novels about the acceptable face of incest. I picked up Liars and Saints because it's been blurbed by both Helen Fielding and Philip Roth, and though I enjoyed the book, that conjunction set up an expectation that couldn't ever be fulfilled: sometimes blurbs can be too successful. I was hoping for something bubbly and yet achingly world-weary, something diverting and yet full of lacerating and unforgettable insights about the human condition, something that was fun while being at the same time no fun at all, in a bracing sort of a way, something that cheered me up while making me want to hang myself. In short, I wanted Roth and Fielding to have co-written the book, and poor Maile Meloy couldn't deliver. Liars and Saints is a fresh, sweet-natured first novel, but it's no Nathan Zuckerman's Diary. (Cigarettes—23, attacks of Weltschmerz—141, etc.)

How I Live Now has had amazing reviews here in England—someone moderately sensible called it "a classic"—and although that might sometimes be enough to persuade me to shell out (cf. Seven Types of Ambiguity, which has received similar press), normally that wouldn't be enough to persuade me to read the thing. Rosoff's book, however, is delightfully short, and aimed at teenagers, and the publishers sent me a copy, so you can see the thinking here: knock off a classic in a day or so, at no personal expense, and bulk this column out a little. And that's pretty much how things worked out.

I'm not sure that How I Live Now is a classic, though, even if a book can achieve that kind of status in the month of its publication. It's set in a war-torn England a few years from now, and though the love affair between the cousins has a dreamy intensity, and Rosoff's teenage voice is strong and true, her war is a little shoddy, if you ask me. London has been occupied, but by whom no one, not even the adults, seems quite sure: it could be the French, it could be the Chinese. What sort of war is that? Rosoff is aiming for a fog of half-truth and rumor, the sort of fog that most teenagers live in most of the time, and yet one is given the impression that not even Seymour Hersh would be able to shed much light on the matter of who invaded Britain and why.

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